Breakable You (22 page)

Now, in his apartment, at the end of the evening, she said, "So are you giving me your blessing?"

"I'm giving you my blessing no matter what you decide to do. Why are you smiling?"

"I'm thinking about something Jean-Paul Sartre said."

"That's what I love about you, Maud. Most of us smile because we're thinking of things like what we're going to have for dessert. You smile because you're thinking of something Jean-Paul Sartre said. What did he say?"

"Jean-Paul Sartre said that when you ask someone for advice, you've already decided what you're going to do, because we know the advice each of our friends will give, and when we choose who to ask we reveal that we've already chosen what to do."

"Are you saying I'm predictable?"

"I'm saying that you're the only person I know who would tell me that anything I do will be all right."

"Wouldn't your mother?"

"I don't know. She would want to say that. It's what she would say to one of her clients. But I'm not sure she'd be able to say it to me."

She gathered up her things, but then she stopped.

"What was the fourth thing?"

He was fiddling with the control panel of his wheelchair. He looked as if he hadn't heard her. She didn't repeat the question. She knew, of course, what the fourth thing was. The fourth thing was that he was sorry that life hadn't gone differently. Sorry that he wasn't the one this had happened with.

Adam did speak at Ruth's memorial service, and he
was
the star. He had done so many of these events that he had it down to a science. At memorial services, people want to hear stories, and they want to laugh. He told a few stories about Ruth's early life, making everyone remember what a faithful and energetic friend she'd been, and he told a few amusing, gently chiding anecdotes about the zeal with which she devoted herself
to
Izzy.

After the service, people clustered around him, many of them people he knew from the old days, hadn't seen for years, and would have been happy never to see again. Bent-over, bad-toothed do-gooders from the Upper West Side.

Ellie had been at the service, sitting in one of the back rows. Afterward she patted his arm, said, "You did good, Weller," and left.

The only person Adam was glad to see there was Paula Cohen. Paula had been his first editor, when both of them were young.

"Ruth called me just a couple of weeks ago," she said. "I hadn't heard from her for years. When my assistant told me she'd called, I remember thinking that I hadn't even known she was still alive. I never did get back to her. I feel so awful."

Ruth must have wanted her to look at Izzy's manuscript.
She didn't trust me
, Adam thought, with an indignation that, given the circumstances, verged on the insane.

Ruth and Izzy's daughter, Shelly, a kindly, bedraggled social worker, with a face unattractively red and puffy from weeping, told him that he had "really brought Mom into the room."

Adam didn't care for Shelly, for the reason that she hadn't read her father's books. He remembered Izzy once saying, "She just hasn't gotten around to it," and smiling that mild, helpless smile of his. Izzy, at root, probably expected as little from people as Adam did, but where the knowledge of how frail and wavering and unreliable people were had led Adam to become cynical, it had led Izzy to become more tolerant, more compassionate.

Adam accompanied Shelly to Ruth's. She wanted him to collect Izzy's papers as soon as he could so she could clear out the apartment. Ruth had been her husband's literary executor; years ago, she had asked Adam to take over the role if he survived her.

The last visit to the old place. About twenty people were milling around by the time he got there. Ruth had had more friends than he'd realized. Some of them he recognized vaguely; some of them he'd never seen before. He leaned against the wall eating a slice of babka and drinking weak coffee while a couple of Ruth's old friends coyly asked him if he remembered them. He felt as if his presence made the gathering more stimulating, more charged; if he left the apartment now, there would be a sense of letdown throughout the room. Everyone would find the gathering a little flatter and less interesting.

Except for the young. Ruth's niece, Leslie, was there, along with her daughter, Morgan, and Morgan was extraordinarily attractive. She had thick dark hair and blue eyes that you noticed from across the room. She was wearing a black dress that was probably a little too short for the occasion.

At one point Adam found himself near her at the table where the refreshments were laid out. She was examining the tea bags. Finally she chose something herbal. Peppermint Sunrise or something like that. Insipid.

The coffee and hot water were in large silver urns, so he couldn't gallantly pour water in her cup for her.

"I'm sorry about your great-aunt," he said.

"Thanks." She was hunting for something on the table and didn't bother looking up at him.

"We were very old friends. I grew up with your great-uncle."

She glanced up at him and then resumed her search. "That's nice."

She was even more beautiful from this distance. A dark-haired, sleepy-lidded, long-limbed beauty.

"Are you looking for something?" he said. "Can I help you with something?"

"Nope. Found it." A jar of honey, hidden behind a column of plastic cups. She put a spoonful of honey in her tea and then headed back to her mother.

Either she didn't know who he was, or she knew and didn't give a shit. And why should she give a shit? Young people today, if they read at all, tended to read no one older than Dave Eggers or Lorrie Moore. Even if she does know who I am, Adam thought, to her I'm just another dead white male.

And he'd published his last ambitious book eight years ago, when she was probably barely into her teens. The three things he'd published since then had been trifles. A collection of essays; a slim collection of four autobiographical lectures that he'd given at Duke; and an even slimmer book of short stories.

Hasn't done much lately.

He sat next to Shelly on the couch.

"How are you holding up?"

"I can't believe she's gone. My mommy. I guess I thought she'd be around to take care of me forever."

Rolling one's eyeballs at the bereaved, or suggesting that she might consider growing up, was probably not the appropriate response in a situation like this.

He squeezed her elbow wordlessly and arranged his features into a sympathetic configuration. Lips pressed together in some sort of "I-share-your-pain, keep-your-chin-up" mode.

"I guess I should show you the things she wanted you to have," Shelly said.

She led him to Ruth's bedroom. Near the window were two large black trunks, the kind of things a seafarer would bring along to the ship.

"There you are," she said. "Everything he thought was worth keeping. It doesn't look like much, does it?"

"Your father was his own toughest critic. I have a hunch that all the things he saved were gems."

"Maybe. Even if they were, I wouldn't be able to judge. My dad's writing was always over my head. A while ago my mother said she found something of his she'd never read before, and she said it was great. But she thought everything he did was great."

"Did she show it to you?"

"By the time I got here she was already in the hospital. I haven't been to New York in three years. I kept wanting to visit, but I've been so busy."

"Of course," Adam said.

"I really don't have the strength to go through my father's old papers right now. If you could just take it all and do what you want with it, I'd really appreciate it. I just don't have the time right now."

Or the interest, he thought. Maud was the only one of his children who was the least bit literary, but all of them had read his books.

"I can't believe they're both gone now," Shelly said. She sat on the bed, head down, arms hanging limply. She looked like an abandoned marionette. "I'm an orphan now."

Adam sat down beside her and placed his hand on her back. Consolingly. He said something about how she could count on him, and not just on him, but on the many people who had loved Ruth and Izzy. What he was thinking was: When did I leave the human community? When did it happen? There was a time when I could have listened to this without wanting to throw her out the window—a woman in her late thirties talking about feeling like an "orphan." If I stay a little longer, I'm sure I'll have the privilege of listening to Shelly talk about her "inner child." Is there anyone left in America who truly wants to be an adult?

Maybe the human community, he thought as he walked home, has left
me
. It was early evening. Broadway on the Upper West Side, from the nineties to the seventies, was a haunted avenue, a promenade of the dead and the missing. In the cold and brittle air, the ghosts of the people he had lost were more real to him than the living figures who passed him, hunched over, faces muffled in scarves.

He had arranged with Ruth's super to have the trunks delivered to his apartment. They arrived later that night. They didn't contain any surprises. One trunk contained letters that Izzy had received and carbon copies of letters he'd written, all of them meticulously organized by date. The other contained the manuscripts of Izzy's published stories and novels and the carbon copy of
So Late So Early
.

It had been a few months since Adam had looked at the manuscript. He sat at his kitchen table and leafed through it.

It was as strong as he'd remembered. Stronger, perhaps. It was a book that became deeper, richer, the more you considered it. Adam couldn't get over his astonishment that his old friend had managed to write this well during his last years.

Adam hadn't done any work yet that day. He went to his computer, wrote a few sentences, played around with them, wasn't satisfied.

He thought of the blank indifferent look that had been given him by Izzy's grandniece Morgan.

Hasn't done much lately.

He wrote another sentence, played around with it, wasn't satisfied.

He went back to the kitchen and read another page of Izzy's novel. It seemed more and more clear to him that the main character was partly based on him. Several things he had told Izzy in confidence had ended up on the page. Adam noticed this without being troubled by it. It's just what a writer does. If you believe that anything you tell a writer will truly be held in confidence, then you're a fool.

The main character was so much like himself as a younger man that people might almost believe that he had written it.

The main character was so much like himself as a younger man that people might believe that he had written it.

Why not?

If he published this book under his own name, no one would know.

It was a perfect solution to two problems: the problem of Adam's temporary lack of inspiration, and the problem that if his rivalry with Izzy prevented him from trying to publish the book, the world would be deprived of a fine novel.

It didn't matter to Izzy; it didn't matter to Ruth. The only person it mattered to was Adam. If it was published as Izzy's book, his own life, Adam's life, would be changed—changed for the worse. Reviewers would begin to compare them again, and some of them would decide that Izzy had been the better writer.

If it was published as Adam's book, on the other hand, his life would be changed for the better. It would be called one of his best books—a book as strong as the things he wrote in his forties. It would be hailed as a literary comeback.

So if one put aside all sentimentality, acknowledged in a clear-eyed way that nothing mattered to the dead, it was obviously true that the only person who would be affected by this was Adam. Therefore, it made no sense to publish it under Izzy's name, and all the sense in the world to publish it under his own.

He brought Izzy's manuscript to his desk, sat down, and began transcribing it into his computer. Even in the first few paragraphs, he changed a word or two, making it more his own.

Eleanor met Patrick at the arch in Washington Square Park. When she arrived, he was waiting for her, leaning against the arch with a wry smile.

"Both times I've seen you, you've wanted to meet in public," he said. "If I didn't know better I'd think you were afraid I was trying to bump you off."

She didn't have a witty reply to this, so she didn't say anything.

She took his arm and they walked through the park. The smell of marijuana was thick in the air.

"I'm paying forty thousand dollars a year for Kate to go to college here," he said.

Thompson Street was blocked off below Washington Square. There were long trailers taking up half the street, tables filled with Gatorade and platters of sandwiches, huge klieg lights like creatures from outer space. Two techies in headsets prowled the end of the block, self-importantly shooing people away.

"Street's blocked off. Try MacDougal."

"This is a public street," Patrick said.

"Office of the Mayor says it's not a public street tonight. We've got a scene to wrap here, dude."

"I've never been called 'dude' before," Patrick said to Eleanor.

"Gotta move, gotta move, gotta move," the techie was saying to another man, a nerdlike figure in a short-sleeved shirt who was holding an ice-cream cone and standing on tiptoes, scanning for the faces of the famous. "Gotta book, dog."

"I wonder why I was dude and he was dog," Patrick said.

"It's hard to say," Eleanor said.

The short-sleeved man was following the techie. "What are you filming?"

"Sean Penn, Angelina Jolie," the techie said. "
Help Wanted
."

A child actor who didn't look familiar to Eleanor was being filmed as she walked down a flight of steps outside a brown-stone. When she reached the street, the cameras were turned off, four or five men came together for a huddled conference. One of them broke off and talked to the girl, who walked back up the steps, waited as two women attended to her hair, waited further as a squad of men adjusted the lights, and walked down the steps again.